No Antibiotic Limitations

Team

STEVE LUFKIN

ERIC STERN

Eric Stern, SeLux co-founder and CTO and acting CEO, has over 20 years of R&D experience and 9+ years leading industrial R&D teams. He has has led the development 1 commercially-available product and 2 projects currently in late-stage commercial development. He has published over 25 peer-reviewed papers, including first-author publications in Nature, Nature Materials, and Nature Nanotechnology, has 13 granted and pending patents, and 11 active provisionals. He earned a B.S. degree in Chemistry, a M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Yale University and performed postdoctoral research at Harvard University before entering industry. When not working or playing with his growing family, he’s generally asleep or stuck in traffic.

ALEKSANDAR VACIC, PhD

Aleksandar Vacic is the President and co-founder of SeLux. His primary leadership role at SeLux is engineering and product development. As an applied physicist and electrical engineer, Alek believes that both strong theoretical foundations and hands-on practical insights must be exploited to commercialize novel technologies. He enjoys working with multidisciplinary teams solving complex problems. His work has spanned semiconductors, plasma engineering, optics, optoelectronics, bioelectronics, Monte Carlo simulations, and numerical algorithms.

Previously, he led the Cell Processing team at 1366 Technologies where he transferred processes to customer manufacturing sites in Asia and Europe, and developed a plasma texturing process for high efficiency solar cells.

While at Yale he developed fabrication and design methods to improve yield and reliability of nanoscale biosensors including the understanding of semiconductor-biomolecule interaction which resulted in a novel calibration and quantification methodology. He has 2 granted, 1 licensed, and 10 pending patents and provisional applications. He earned his PhD from Yale and Dipl.-Ing. (5 year) in Technical Physics from the School of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade (Serbia) as Valedictorian (Class of 600+). While at Yale he was awarded the Best Presentation award at the Nanodevices for Defense and Security Conference 2009 and Yale College Prize Teaching Fellowship. When not solving difficult problems, Alek enjoys travelling, cooking and running with his awesome spouse, Yi-Wen.

BENJAMIN SPEARS, PhD

Ben joined SeLux in the fall of 2015 as the Senior Research Chemist and his work is focused on the development of amplification technologies for the advancement of high sensitivity assay platforms. Ben has more than 8 years of interdisciplinary experience, centered around polymer chemistry, which encompasses nanoparticle, hydrogel, and bioconjugate formation. From this work, Ben has developed knowledge of all stages of polymer research, from conception and synthesis of starting materials, to polymer formation and utilization, including appropriate corresponding characterization. Ben received his PhD from Vanderbilt University where he pioneered the development of several novel methods utilizing polymers he conceived and synthesized while simultaneously developing external collaborations with multiple labs. Ben’s work has led to multiple publications, patents, and presentations.

NATHAN PURMORT, MSEE

Nate joined SeLux early in 2016 and with over 10 years in industry, he brings a breadth of engineering and medical product development experience to the team. Prior to SeLux he was at DEKA R&D where he worked as an FPGA Architect, Systems Engineer, and Electrical Engineering team lead. In these roles Nate worked with Fortune 500 clients and contractors and managed aspects of the manufacturing transfer of 3 mid-high volume class 2 medical devices – all of which received FDA 510(k) clearance. Nate also previously worked as an embedded software engineer in public safety technology and holds a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire.

FELICIA GIOK, MSc

Felicia joined the SeLux Diagnostics team in August 2016 as a scientist after graduating from Kansas State University with her MSc. She has 2+ years of experience in antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST), with hands-on experience in various techniques in R&D and laboratory settings. Her research work at KSU included profiling antibiotic resistance in different beneficial bacterial strains used in direct-fed microbials (DFMs) and observing for transfer of resistance between the strains, specifically Enterococcus faecium. She presented her research at two oral presentations: the American Society of Animal Science Midwest Meeting (2016) in Des Moines, IA and the K-State Graduate Research, Arts, and Discovery Forum (2016) at KSU. Her expertise also covers genetic profiling of these strains and characterization of clinically important bacterial strains. She enjoys amassing various skills and is currently dipping her toes in early stage computer programming. Prior to her graduate work, she was part of a wonderful spay/neuter clinic team of animal lovers, helping companion animals to find loving homes.

KELLY FLENTIE, PhD

Kelly joined SeLux Diagnostics in 2016 as the Senior Microbiologist. Kelly brings more than 15 years of multidisciplinary investigative experience in microbiology, antimicrobial drug development, imaging technologies, and high-throughput screening to the team. Kelly earned her Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis investigating interactions between Salmonella and cancer cells, with an emphasis on characterizing bacterial behaviors that could be coopted for novel cancer treatment or diagnostic strategies. Her postdoctoral research focused on stress tolerance mechanisms in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and identifying novel antimicrobials to target this pathogen. Her work has led to multiple peer-reviewed journal articles, a pending patent, a Principle Investigator pilot project grant award, and selection for an oral presentation at a Gordon conference on Tuberculosis drug development.

SARAH SCOTT, BSChE

Sarah Scott joined the SeLux team in April 2017. As a Senior Engineer, Sarah leads the implementation of the Quality Management System at SeLux. Sarah brings more than half a decade of experience in process development and pharmaceutical manufacturing. At contract manufacturing organization Albany Molecular Research Incorporated, Sarah worked as a Process Engineer. In this role, she led the manufacture of several early-stage clinical products. Prior to joining SeLux, Sarah served as the Director of Manufacturing at PixarBio Corporation. There she led the company’s transition from process development to manufacturing. Sarah holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University.

KAYLA DAPONTE, MLS (ASCP)CM

DEREK PUFF, PhD

As the Principal Software Developer, Derek is responsible for the design and implementation of the software architecture for the SeLux Diagnostics AST platform.

Derek has over 20 years of experience in the medical imaging, biotech, and immunotherapy industries. Prior to joining SeLux Diagnostics, he was Principal Software Developer at the Waltham site for Juno Therapeutics, a Seattle-based immunotherapy company. At Juno, he built a suite of data storage, processing, and analysis tools to enable identification of lead candidates in the Juno antibody discovery platform. Previously, Derek was Director of Software Engineering at SRU Biosystems, where he developed data acquisition and analysis capabilities for their label-free detection platform for small molecule and protein binding assays. He began his career with Picker Medical Systems (now Philips Healthcare), working on visualization of dose distributions for their AcQSim™ radiation therapy treatment planning software.

FRED FLOYD

ZHI ZHANG

BETH BAUMAN, MSME

TBD

Director of Operations

Message

We founded SeLux in 2014 after a successful technical demonstration done in partnership with a Harvard clinic. We are very thankful to all our investors for giving us the opportunity to change the field of diagnostics. We have built our core team and are always looking for scientific and engineering talent.

Board of Directors

SCOTT YAPHE

Scott is a Managing Director of Schooner Capital focused on investment opportunities in venture and growth-stage companies as well as alternative asset funds. Prior to Schooner, Scott spent 12 years as a General Partner at ABS Ventures, a multi-stage private investment firm. Scott has served on the board of directors of numerous companies including Adeptra (acquired by FICO), Synchronoss Technologies (NASDAQ:SNCR), Workbrain (TSX:WB) and Paratek (acquired by RIM). Before joining ABS Ventures, he was Director of Corporate Development at a telecommunications company as well as a management consultant with A.T. Kearney where he focused on corporate strategy in emerging market regions. Scott received his MBA from Harvard Business School and Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University.

PARKER CASSIDY

Parker leads worldwide commercial operations for Mitra Biotech, a pioneer in novel technologies to better predict personalized therapy response in oncology. Mitra’s proprietary CANScriptTM assay tests how a patient’s tumor responds to numerous therapy combinations while retaining the critical components of the tumor microenvironment, including the immune compartment and heterogeneity. Mitra has demonstrated an extremely high correlation between its in-vitro predictions and what happens in-vivo in the clinic across different tumor types and drug classes. Importantly, the company has also demonstrated that immune checkpoint inhibitors can be successfully tested on the platform. Parker works with clinicians to demonstrate CANScriptTM clinical utility, and with biopharma clients to use the system as models for patient response – speeding development of new drugs. For over 15 years, Parker has been developing and launching novel diagnostic and drug discovery products and services with companies including BD and Upstate Biotechnology (now EMD Millipore).